Supreme Court

This is brilliant. Looking forward to seeing how far Colbert can go with this. Ryan J. Reilly writes on Talking Points Memo:

Stephen Colbert doesn’t “want to be the one chump” without any unlimited corporate money going to his political action committee. That’s why he showed up the the Federal Election Commission building in D.C. to formally request an advisory opinion on behalf of “Colbert Super PAC,” a proposed independent expenditure only committee able to accept unlimited corporate, individual, political committee and labor contributions.

Accepting unlimited funding is “a right as described by the Citizens United case,” Colbert said in response to a question from Politico’s Ken Vogel. “I believe the Citizens United decision was the right one, there should be unlimited corporate money, and I want some of it. I don’t want to be the one chump who doesn’t have any.”

The madness surrounding Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s efforts to destroy trade unionism continues apace, but outsiders are likely to be deceived into thinking momentum of the Madison Uprising has been dissipated from its previous well-defined orbit….

Warren Richey writes in the Christian Science Monitor: Supreme Court Justice Alito is the lone dissenter in the 8-to-1 ruling on free-speech principles, saying the conduct of the Westboro Baptist Church ’caused…

From the Huffington Post: With Democrats increasingly outraged over the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision that allowed unlimited corporate spending in elections — a change conservatives have been more successful at taking…

Rady Ananda writes for Thepeoplesvoices.org: First, we spit out our coffee over President Obama’s appointments of former Monsanto goon Michael Taylor as Food Safety [sic] Czar and ‘biotech governor of the year’…

So who were the winners from the big news First Amendment decision handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday? Free-speech advocates say the Supreme Court protected the First Amendment. Animal-rights advocates…

In order to guard citizens against the whims of the King, the right to a trial by jury was established by the Magna Carta in 1215, and it has become one of the most sacrosanct legal aspects of British and American societies. We tend to believe that the duty of a jury is solely to determine whether someone broke the law. In fact, it’s not unusual for judges to instruct juries that they are to judge only the facts in a case, while the judge will sit in judgment of the law itself. Nonsense.

Juries are the last line of defense against the power abuses of the authorities. They have the right to judge the law. Even if a defendant committed a crime, a jury can refuse to render a guilty verdict. Among the main reasons why this might happen, according to attorney Clay S. Conrad:

When the defendant has already suffered enough, when it would be unfair or against the public interest for the defendant to be convicted, when the jury disagrees with the law itself, when the prosecution or the arresting authorities have gone “too far” in the single-minded quest to arrest and convict a particular defendant, when the punishments to be imposed are excessive or when the jury suspects that the charges have been brought for political reasons or to make an unfair example of the hapless defendant …

Another chapter from my book 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know, published in 2003. For more on me, check out: The Memory Hole. _____________________________________ In the early 1920s, Dr. Linder was…

David R. Jones, Esq., President and CEO, Community Service Society of New York, at Huffington Post: I’ve always been particularly contemptuous of conspiracy theories, whether it’s U.N. sponsored black helicopters, the dangers…

Following the Supreme Court decision implicitly granting corporations the right to free speech (by determining that political spending is a kind of speech), a corporation has decided to take what it believes to be “democracy’s next step”: It is running for Congress.

With more than a twinge of irony, Murray Hill Incorporated, a liberal public relations firm, recently announced that it planned to run in the Republican primary in Maryland’s 8th Congressional District.

This political media are all over this story. Here’s the Huffington Post’s take on it:

With the Supreme Court Justices sitting right in front of him, President Barack Obama unloaded in his State of the Union address on this past week’s ruling qualifying corporations as having the rights of citizens and opening the “floodgates” to their political donations.

“Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests – including foreign corporations – to spend without limit in our elections,” Obama said. “Well I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities. They should be decided by the American people, and that’s why I’m urging Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps to right this wrong.”

There was some strong applause from members of Congress — with both sides of the chamber rising to their feet with applause. The Justices — all there except Scalia and Thomas — sat in silence (as is their custom), but at the beginning of the exchange, Justice Alito [on the far left] can be seen shaking his head and mouthing words that seem to resemble “not true.”